Gigi

Were I to format my reviews listing out the positive and negative aspects of a film into defined sections, the positives would look like this: Positives: I like Leslie Caron's feisty, spunky attitude (up until the last act). The colors POP. And that would be the end of them, because this movie is hot fucking garbage. The least of the issues, which is like saying "the least fatal of the victim's bullet wounds", is the music, which is quite the issue given this is a musical. Only two songs out of the twelve or so are memorable, and they are for entirely the wrong reasons (we'll get to that). Every one of them is forgettable and disposable in a way no song in a musical should. Normally, dance routines in musicals break my immersion, but Gigi could've used a little movement to inject some life into these dead-on-arrival nothingburger songs, and the movie as a whole. Which brings me to the disjointed, scattered story, where Gigi might be the third most important person in the movie named after her. When the movie isn't about her rebelling against her etiquette teacher's Professor Higgins-esque lessons, it's about Gaston, a wistful drip of a person who finds life boring if something new isn't happening every second of every day. He's a rich, high society bachelor who just can't deal with parties and money and women. It's the most first-world, white-people problem a movie has ever been built around, and it is nauseating. Gigi spends inordinate time following around this sad sack around Paris, resenting his station in life, every agonizing second that ticks by making me wish more and more that a piano would fall on his head. And when it's not following him, it's following the aunt and the etiquette teacher ... or Gaston's uncle ... and then, occasionally, checking in on Gigi, because Gigi just isn't that interesting of a character as written. Nobody is, and I know I complimented Leslie Caron's feisty attitude earlier, but that aspect of Gigi is entirely here; Gigi, the character independent of the actor, is an average teenager who tries to push back against her strict guardians. We never get a hint of what she wants or why, what she'd rather do than become a proper young woman in turn-of-the-century Parisian society, She is a plot device with arms and legs, a thing for the other characters to orbit around for its weightless, unfocused, dull story. If it were just those, that would be more than enough to write off this failure and go about my day. But then there's something I hinted at earlier when I mentioned the two memorable songs; Gigi's love story and whole vibe is gross. Like, get-put-on-a-registry kind of gross. Gigi is 15 and Gaston is 30. "Oh, but that was more acceptable back then!" I hear someone saying, and I tell you to think about what you're defending. There's plenty of things that were acceptable in a previous era that we've come to understand is terrible now. We're allowed to judge it in retrospect. Worse still is that this is the entire point of the movie. This isn't a passing reference or a fleeting glimpse. "30 year old man slowly realizes he's in love with a child" is the entire plot. One of those two unfortunately memorable songs is Gaston realizing he's in love with her, and he comments about how he's watched her grow up from a little girl and she's blossomed into such a wonderful young woman and WHAT THE FUCK, MOVIE, NO, BAD, BAD! The other of the two memorable songs, which opens the movie, is no better, talking about how great it is that little girls become women who can eventually make men so crazy, they'll blow through the ceiling (not even kidding about that line), in case you thought it was a one-off. No, Gigi the movie is built on this, and Gigi the the character only exists as a chalice to be won. She isn't a person, she's a conquest-in-waiting, lacking in any sense of agency. Piling on top of all this is that Gaston is, even outside the pedophilia, a mercurial jackass. He comes over to her apartment at one point, and she comes out proud to show him the beautiful new gown she got, and he gets mad and insults her because it isn't her normal outfit (the normal outfit being a plaid schoolgirl-style outfit); he then thinks about it, comes back, apologizes, and says it was a nice dress. This pattern repeats later, when they go on a first date and Gigi puts into action all the proper-young-woman behavior she's been taught, and he gets mad at her because she isn't the sassy girl she normally is, but he doesn't tell her this. He just drags her out of the restaurant -- I mean, literally, physically drags her by the arm as she's crying and begging for an explanation -- and takes her home without a word, then leaves, walks around in the rain for a few minutes, goes back, and, without an explanation or an apology or anything, proposes marriage. OUR HERO, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. I just can't with this movie. I just can't. It's boring in the extreme, when the music isn't giving you the heebie-jeebies it's leaving your brain as quickly as it entered, its characters are flimsier than dollar-store gauze, its story is dragged out, and the whole thing is built around a premise that is offensive and felonious. The only reason I don't give it a half star is Leslie Caron and the set and costume design. Everything else can die in a fire.